Battle Between Military Life, Marriage : Ex-Spouses Say Home Is No Match for Soldiers’ Careers, Sense of Duty

Cara Lou Wifler served an 18-year hitch as a Marine Corps wife before she and her husband split up. She says that she survived some difficult times in her life but that “the toughest thing I ever did was to be the wife of a Marine.”

Wifler, 53, of Irvine, said her husband--to whom she is still legally married but has not lived with for nearly a decade--”felt very comfortable being a Marine but never was comfortable being a husband or a father. He was totally out of his element at home.”

Wifler, the founder of a local chapter of an outreach program for ex-military spouses, and other experts say the daily rigors of military life can put extraordinary strain on a marriage. For some women, particularly wives of Marine Corps aviators, the strain can reach a breaking point.

“She has this invisible trash bag over her shoulder and all this stuff goes in there,” said Dr. Frank E. Dully Jr., 59, a former Navy flight surgeon and now a part-time professor at the University of Southern California. “The bag does not have a vent at the bottom. It just gets fuller and fuller and fuller. It gets heavier and heavier and heavier.”

Wives are left behind much of the time to take care of the family, often living in Spartan base housing or in off-base homes they can barely afford. The lifestyle often leads to resentment and marital problems, and sometimes separation and divorce.

Some faltering marriages can lead to tragedy. Last October, a despondent Marine wife in the midst of a divorce with her fighter pilot husband shot and killed her two small daughters and tried to kill herself.

Kristine Marie Cushing, 39, wife of Lt. Col. John P. Cushing Jr., 38, a Persian Gulf veteran and the commander of an El Toro-based F/A-18 fighter squadron, told sheriff’s deputies when they arrived at her Laguna Niguel home that she had shot her two daughters, Stephanie Marie, 4, and Amy Elizabeth, 8. She had filed for divorce in September, but she and her husband were still living in the same house. She said in divorce documents that the arrangement was causing her “extreme tension and emotional stress.”

One woman who asked not to be identified said that her 20-year marriage to a Marine was as intense as “walking a tightrope.” She said she often was left alone to cope with family problems that he did not want to deal with.

However, Dixie Miller, 56, who has been married 32 years to Maj. Gen. Donald E.P. Miller, a former wing commander at El Toro, said her life in the Marine Corps was not that much different than what she imagines life would be like in corporate America, where husbands who are executives work long hours and move from city to city.

“You and your husband have to be able to sit down and work things out,” she said in a telephone interview from Pace, Fla. “This is the main thing, being able to work together as a team. I enjoyed every aspect of the military and every aspect of our life together.”

But Dully, who teaches a course in aviation safety at USC, said the duty to country and the responsibility of marriage can cause enormous friction between a Marine aviator and his wife.

“This man would rather fly his F/A-18 than do anything else in the world,” said Dully, who retired from the Navy in 1987 as a captain. “He is having a ball, and he thinks his wife is having a ball. For her the most important thing is the family, and for him the most important thing is the Marine Corps.”

Dully said his research shows that Marine and Navy fighter pilots are bright, aggressive and ambitious; 80% of them are the oldest sons. He describes the typical aviator as “a special breed of cat who desperately wants to please his father.”

Many of the pilots marry the oldest daughters who also are bright, aggressive and ambitious, Dully said. Both husband and wife want to be “controllers,” and because of his absence during long deployments and training missions she is forced “to become independent in a way that she never thought existed,” he said.

While in the Navy, Dully produced a video that was aimed at helping the wives of naval aviators better understand their husbands. It was entitled “Sex and the Naval Aviator.”

But Dully admitted that some aviators’ wives do not want their husbands to change.

Dully recalled that after one of his talks with an F-4 Phantom squadron in Hawaii, a pilot stayed behind to tell him that he suddenly realized what a jerk he’d been in his marriage. The pilot pledged that evening to spend more time with his family, be a better husband and a more tolerant and sensitive father. The effort ended in disaster.

“He was going to change his life and he set out to do this,” Dully said. “His wife . . . ran off with a Harrier pilot, and he ended up with nothing--no wife, no kids, no flying.”

Lynne Adams, 50, the ex-wife of Brig. Gen. Wayne Adams, an aviator and former commander of El Toro Marine Corps Air Station, estimated that during their 26-year marriage, she and her husband were apart nearly half the time.

“The Marine Corps says they are family-oriented, but they make it very difficult to be a family. I mean extremely difficult to be a family,” she said in a telephone interview from Burke, Va.

The wives never seem to be in one place long enough to foster a career or put together a support group, said Laguna Beach attorney Lisa Staight, who through the years has handled many military divorces.

Lynne Adams said she felt lost following her divorce.

“I was not only divorced from him but also from the Marine Corps,” she said. “It was painful because I did put a lot of time into the Marine Corps. I tried to make things better as a wife and promote the Marine Corps. I sacrificed a lot as far as my family and my children were concerned.”

Wifler, the founder of the Orange County chapter of Ex-Partners of Servicemen/Women for Equality (EX-POSE), said the life of a military wife shifts between the reality of not having enough money for food and clothing to an unreal anticipation of the future.

“When you are married to a career Marine you have so many reunions and so many honeymoons,” she said. “When he is gone you look for his return. That is what you do in the Marine Corps, look forward. Look forward to the next rank, look forward to the next duty station, look forward to retirement. It is as if you never live in the here and now.

“I would tell him I needed more money, and he would tell me to make it stretch. He would tell me he did not serve for money, but he served for honor and glory. It is very hard to clothe and feed the children on honor and glory.

“The mission was the only thing that was important. The fact that your kid was sick or your wife was in the hospital, those things did not really matter because the mission was what was important. The only person ever married in our relationship was me. He lived his life as a single man, and if there were marital problems, they had to be mine.”